Modern Architecture & Design news

The Office of Metropolitan Architecture and Dutch development company, Multi Vastgoed, today unveiled a concept design for a mixed-use building to be situated in the Coolsingel, the heart of Rotterdam’s shopping district. The project will contain 120,000 sq m of program, including 30,000 sq m of retail space and 70,000 sq m of office, residential, culture and leisure space. The project will also reuse the historic ABN-AMBRO building, an impressive bank building that was the first to be erected in the city center after World War II.

OMA’s cube aims to change the identity of the city center from its current identity as a series of tower projects. The base of the cube will consist of five floors of retail space within which will be provided connections to the city’s most important streets: Coolsingel, Lijnbaan, Binnerweg and Beurstraverse. These spaces will also potentially connect to the existing underground station. Public programs as restaurants, exhibition and media spaces are located in the middle and top floors of the cube. From these floors the public will overlook the entire Rotterdam area.

The project is scheduled to begin construction in 2001 and open in 2013.

The University of California at Berkeley has a tradition of being both innovative and experimental. So when it came to selecting an architect for the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA), it did not depart from that tradition. After considering 220 internationally based firms and short-listing four, UC Berkeley selected Tokyo-based Toyo Ito and Associates to design its new building. The project will be the first in the United States by Ito, who has designed numerous buildings in Japan and around the globe including the highly acclaimed Sendai Mediateque, in Sendai, Japan.

Ito’s design calls for a three-storey building with an unexpectedly fluid steel exterior that curves to meet dramatic, towering windows. The 139,000 sq ft interior will comprise a loose grid of interlocking spaces with gently curve walls that wind and bend throughout the structure. In places, the gallery walls will separate as if pulled aside like curtains, to allow passage between the varied exhibition areas.

The museum’s first floor will house two theatres, five exhibition galleries, a museum store and cafe. The second floor will include eight galleries, a screening room, the Conceptual Art Study Center, a learning center, and a library. On the top floor will be seven galleries dedicated to works on paper and the BAM/PFA’s celebrated Asian art collection. This floor will include an Asian garden gallery.

Ito’s design is a welcome departure from the traditional campus buildings. With its largely transparent ground floor façade that invites exploration of the museum within and a large multi-purpose interior forum, the building offers opportunities for rich interactions with the diverse population and institutions that comprise the UC Berkeley community.

Harrison Fraker, Dean of UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design, said, “ I can’t imagine a University having the ambition of being the best in the world without it having the best museum and film archive in the world.”

The final design for the museum is expected to be complete at the end of 2009 and the museum anticipates that the building will open in 2003.

Foster + Partners has completed a headquarters building for Ernst & Young at the gateway to the Vivaldi-park area of the new Zuidas district, south of Amsterdam. Commissioned by ING, the tower establishes a landmark on the route into the city with its diagrid façade. Ten per cent more efficient than the target Dutch environmental standards, the building also extends the public realm with a water court at its base.

The 24-storey building is divided into two twelve metre-wide column free towers with open, flexible floor plates. The blocks are staggered in plan to admit as much natural light as possible and to make the most of the northerly city views. The northern façade is fully glazed, while partial thirty per cent glazing to the east, west and south limits solar gain. Combined with ground water storage to further save on energy for cooling, the overall environmental strategy is highly efficient.

Linked by a shared transparent core, the offices are serviced by double-height meeting spaces and light-filled social spaces allowing communication between different floors. The structural steel diagrid is clad in silver aluminium and is offset by opaque black panels, which reduce the definition of the individual floor levels. This lattice scales the entire 87-metre high facade and gives the building its identity. At the base of the building the height of the diagrid creates a triple-storey lobby space, while at the top of each tower north and south-facing terraces are set into the structure.

The towers are approached via a water-court with an ecological pond beneath an overhanging canopy. Defining the relationship between public and private, this space houses the social functions, such as staff restaurant, terrace, auditorium and bar, clustered around the water-court. Coupled with a green roof on the restaurant building, the pond has an important environmental contribution. 65 per cent of rainwater is retained on site while the run-off feeds into the Amsterdam canal system to control water levels following peak rainfall. The pond is naturally cleansed by a planted biotope of reeds, water lilies and grasses.

David Nelson, Senior Executive and joint Head of Design at Foster + Partners said:

“Our first building in Amsterdam not only exceeds Dutch environmental regulations by ten per cent, but provides a striking marker for the Vivaldi park area, a high quality, flexible working environment for tenants Ernst & Young and a lively public water-court with a working ecological pond at its base.”

SEA and EFFEKT architect firms win first prize for Academy of Arts building in Estonia

Art Plaza, by the two young Danish architect firms SEA and EFFEKT, has been awarded 1st prize in the international competition for the new Academy of Arts building in Tallinn, Estonia.

The new academy building is situated in the heart of Tallinn. The building contains facilities for the departments of art, architecture, design, and art history. In addition to the academic programme the project includes a library, gallery, shop, conference facilities and a public plaza. The competition had 96 entries from 26 countries.

The jury said:

“The Jury voted Art Plaza as the winner of the competition because it is by far the best proposal when it comes to architectural concept, outer qualities and inner life. The project is stunningly simple and at the same time fascinatingly complex.

“The outer shape is a beautifully proportioned square tower. Tallinn’s downtown is dominated by visually “noisy” buildings screaming to each other. In this chaos Art Plaza suggests erecting a quiet, calm and perfect tower with only half the footprint of the site, liberating a 4000m2 plaza in the heart of Tallinn. This plaza will stand out as a unique place in downtown Tallinn, filled with students and art. Art plaza will become the new living room of Tallinn.

“The heart of the building is a spiral void. The corkscrew movement connects the entire building and creates 4 public plazas with stunning views of the entire city. The sky plazas open up the building from within, creating an art academy in constant dialog with the city – a modern open academy, which interacts with society and the world.

“The project has potential of becoming an international masterpiece, the beckon of Estonia, attracting people from all over the world to see the art academy of the future – a calm sculpture in the roar of downtown Tallinn.”

Art_Plaza is an equal cooperation between the two Danish architecture firms SEA and EFFEKT.

Opened in October, 2006, The Carnival Center for the Performing Arts includes the Sanford and Dolores Ziff Ballet Opera House, the John S. and James L. Knight Concert Hall and an outdoor Plaza of the Arts. The 2480-seat Ballet Opera House complex also houses a 200-seat Studio Theatre and offers community oriented theatre for regional and community groups. The 2200-seat Concert Hall building provides choral seating for 200. Behind the orchestra, the Hall houses educational outreach facilities. Between the two buildings is an outdoor oval-shaped Plaza of the Arts bisected by Biscayne Boulevard. The Plaza, designed by Balmori Associates, supports a wide variety of social and cultural public life and art.

Herzog & De Meuron’s revolutionary mixed-use design

With over 50, 000 ft of retail space, residential units and a 300+ parking environment, Herzog & De Meuron’s 11 11 Lincoln road is set to have a big impact. 11 11 is a revolutionary new integrated project that will instill an entirely new context for retail, residential, dining, and parking experiences on Lincoln road, Miami beach’s premier pedestrian promenade. Envisioned by developer Robert Wennett and designed by world renowned architects Herzog & De Meuron, 11 11 is set to open this autumn.

11 11 will be a jutting, strutting building, a study in form and structure all muscle without clothing, according to Jacques Herzog. 11 11 will reinterpret the essence of tropical modernism, crisp structures ocean-liner planed with an original modern twist. Angular exterior cut-outs will allow natural light and the Miami landscape within, infusing retail, residential, creative commercial space and parking with a dynamic energy. Car access will curve through the centre cavity and panoramic layouts will display retail units and spectacular city views.

The new Elephant House at Copenhagen Zoo, designed by architects Foster + Partners, opened yesterday.

The house features two glass-domed enclosures, allowing bull elephants to get away from the rest of the herd when they need to be alone.

Above and below: sketches by Norman Foster

Below is the press release from Foster + Partners:

Elephant House opens at Copenhagen Zoo

The new Elephant House at Copenhagen Zoo opened today following an official ceremony attended by His Royal Highness the Prince Consort of Denmark and his grandson, Prince Christian.

This new Elephant House provides these magnificent animals with a stimulating environment, including easily accessible spaces for the public to enjoy them, and restores the visual relationship between the zoo and the park.

The project has been driven by research into the behavioural patterns of elephants. The tendency for bull elephants in the wild to roam away from the main herd prompted a plan organised around two separate enclosures. Covered with lightweight, glazed domes to provide natural light, these enclosures are designed to bring a sense of light and openness to a building type traditionally characterised as closed.

The spaces maintain a strong visual connection with the sky and changing patterns of daylight and the distinctive ‘fritting’ on the glazing simulates a canopy of trees. The varying levels on the site are exploited in cross-section. The elephant enclosures are set deep into the ground, ensuring excellent insulation on the perimeter walls and a natural fusion with the landscape.

Additionally, the glazed domes have opening windows to allow natural ventilation and there is a heat recovery system – further enhancing the environmental efficiency of the scheme.

The Elephant House is Foster + Partners’ first zoological building. Inserted into the natural contours of the site, it replaces a structure dating from 1914 and sets new standards in zoological design, providing the animals with a stimulating environment that recreates aspects of their former Asian habitat.

It is built with a warm terracotta-coloured concrete and the yellow beach-like sand that naturally existed on the site has been recycled to create the paddocks. The colours and textures convey a sense of the dry riverbed as found at the edge of the rainforest – a favourite haunt of Asian elephants.

With mud holes, scattered pools of water and shading objects, the new Elephant House is a place where the animals can play and interact naturally. Broad public viewing terraces run around the domes externally, while a ramped promenade leads down into an educational space, looking into the enclosures along the way.

Spencer de Grey, Senior Executive and Head of Design said: “As our first zoo project, we were asked to create a new enclosure for a herd of Asian Elephants in Denmark’s renowned Copenhagen Zoo. We have designed a building that not only responds to the animals’ natural behaviour, but is also a seamless insertion into the landscape that uses the site’s natural properties to provide thermal insulation. We are delighted to learn that the elephants are enjoying their new home.”

Notes to editors:

• Copenhagen Zoo is the most visited cultural institution in Denmark, attracting over 1.2 million visitors a year and is set within an historic royal park, adjacent to the Fredriksberg Palace
• The carefully considered landscape, designed by Stig L Andersson, seeks to reinforce the relationship between the zoo and the adjacent royal park and provides the public with more accessible viewing and educational facilities.
• New standards have been set in terms of the elephants’ well-being. The main herd enclosure will, for the first time, enable elephants in captivity to spend the night together, as they would in the wild.
• The ‘fritting’ pattern on the glazed roof canopies was created by sampling four species of tree. A computer script was written to rotate, scale and randomly populate the roof, so that no two ‘leaves’ are the same. The overlapping pattern provides naturalistic dappled light.

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EPR Architects’ selected to regenerate Croydon town centre

An exciting new masterplan for the south of Croydon town centre and a new headquarters for Croydon Council, both designed by EPR Architects, form part of the successful bid submitted by the John Laing Team. Croydon Council have recently selected John Laing as their preferred private sector partner for the regeneration of south of Croydon town centre.

EPR Architects’ masterplan is for four council owned sites and provides a mixture of uses; comprising residential, retail and commercial with a new landscaped public open space, all of which forms an integral part of the wider objectives for the redevelopment of Croydon town centre.

The new council office building will act as a catalyst for the creation of a new civic hub, defining the south of the centre of Croydon. The new headquarters’ sustainable design embraces the Councils aspirations for the future of Croydon and forms a central part of the masterplan.

Waterbrook Greenwich brings innovative retirement living to Sydney

Following the success of the multi award-winning Waterbrook Yowie Bay Lifestyle Resort, Waterbrook Greenwich is finally complete bringing innovative retirement living to Sydney. Opening its doors in February 2008 the Resort has exceeded expectations on many levels. With clean lines, warm meeting areas, amazing views and 5-star facilities, the property has set a new benchmark in retirement living in Australia.

Three years in the making, Waterbrook Greenwich offers a sophisticated way of living. Seventy nine spacious two and three bedroom apartments and penthouses, have been designed by award winning architects Marchese & Partners International. They offer uninterrupted flow, space, unique design and high quality fittings and fixtures. Energy efficient heating and air conditioning gives total control over the environment and the elegant interiors give a sense of luxury never seen before in over 55’s living.

The facilities offered are those you would expect to find at a Five Star Resort including gym, indoor heated pool and spa, beauty salon, hair salon and cinema, library, bowling green, piano bar and restaurant. State of the art emergency call system and security are also in place.

The Waterbrook vision is to revolutionise the concept of retirement village living by offering excellence in design, lifestyle, service, security and care, delivered with integrity and professionalism.

Could HOK’s Airport City be blueprint for a more holistic approach to development?

Hong Kong has been doing it for decades. First roll out the infrastructure, then develop around the transport nodes. Renzo Piano’s Shard of Glass in London will be built over London Bridge Station, verticalising people movement. HOK have now revealed a masterplan for Dublin Airport City which will bring a new business district to the Irish capital just 6 minutes from the airport. The mixed-use business development will create a community of 30,000 people with hotels, shops and offices covering 140 hectares and slash travel emissions caused by traffic to the city centre.

The design was commissioned by Dublin Airport Authority. Dublin Airport services 23.24 million people every year travelling to over 150 destinations but the top ten destinations are short-haul with London, Paris and Manchester accounting for the top three suggesting a large business use pattern for the airport. Currently these travellers would stay in the city centre but the new Airport city would encourage visitors to work and stay beside the Airport. But the plans will also improve public transport into the city centre taking cars off the road.

A new ‘Automated Passenger Mover’ (APM) between the airport and Dublin Airport City has been designed to allow people to move from arrivals to their desk in just 6 minutes. The APM is built 6 metres above the ground separating it from the existing road network making travel faster. It will interconnect with the existing Quality Bus Corridors and the new Metro Station. This transport plan will be central to the success of the Airport City and Dublin as a whole. Tim Gale, HOK’s Head of Master Planning and Urban Design, said:

“Creating a masterplan that integrated with the surrounding development and remained compact was crucial to the success of this design. With increased transport links to the city centre, Airport City will attract global brands to the area and help make Dublin a leading commercial capital in Europe’s future.”

Phase 1 and transport links are due to be put in place by 2013 with completion scheduled for 2033.